After several years, it was time to retire Brook Group, my company that had grown within these walls on Main Street in Ellicott City.

We divided my two buildings to be available for two separate tenants.

Over time, a few tenants came and went. The last tenant owned a stable and reliable business and stayed with us for seven years. The income provided me the early retirement I had planned for when I made all of the improvements I did to the township of Ellicott City.

This was always my plan.

My retirement was short-lived. I was too young to truly retire. One of my life goals was to get back to making art, and the rental income from a stable tenant provided me the opportunity to start a whole new business.

I learned about using beeswax as a painting medium, an ancient technique known as encaustic, and decided to raise bees for the wax. As I learned about the bees, I learned that it’s not wise to take their wax, and in a short time, I started a “Bee Inspired” brand in 2012. By 2015 I was working a full-time schedule again, and this new adventure would be funded entirely by my real estate income from Ellicott City.

In May 2016, I was excited to land our first salon in charming Oella, Maryland, just down the street from historic Ellicott City. I decided to hand-deliver their first order and headed into my old territory.

I had not been to Ellicott City in more than seven years.

I drove my old route into town and was floored to discover an enormous amount of new development in all the highest elevations outside the old city where large expanses of tall trees once lived.

At the corner which leads down into the old city, where there was once a FOREST of very tall old-as-dirt trees, there was now an extremely dense apartment and townhome community called Burgess Mill Station,

I wondered if the name of the project had anything to do with the same Burgess family that owned the dilapidated, once-condemned building next to mine on Main Street.

Ellicott Mills Drive was closed when I meandered down the hill in late May 2016. As I got closer to the detour, I saw that the street for one block had caved in. A water main broke and caused the road to cave in. This was alongside the brand-new construction site more than two months before “the flood” on Ellicott Mills Drive.

I found this view on google maps, I have outlined the repair in red so that you can see just how much the road caved in, and again, this was months before the heavy rains that hit the area in 2016 when THIRTEEN water mains broke during the rain event.

This is the same road, different view, also from google maps.

Traffic was directed through Burgess Mill Station to get around the caved-in road.

Driving through this new community, I remember thinking it felt claustrophobic. I am unsure why I remember this so vividly or why it would be necessary to remember. Still, I put it in the back of my mind, got past the caved-in road, and visited our new customer in Oella to deliver freshly made Bee Inspired goods in person.

Am I the only one to think it peculiar?

Did anyone know that infrastructure was failing in Ellicott City as early as May 2016, before the rain storm?

Am I the only person who wonders if there was a connection between neglected utilities, improperly repaired line breaks, improper road repairs, OLD and poorly maintained water mains, and water main feeder lines that could have contributed to the deluge of water that flooded an entire city and killed two people? The rainstorm of July 2016 dropped approximately three inches of rain.

If you’re like me, you start asking a lot of questions, and if those questions are pointed at a bunch of dudes in the historic town of Ellicott City, at that time, you quickly learn about the need for FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, which sadly did not result in a single answer to even the most basic question: Who oversaw the water main upkeep and repair in the historic watershed area of Main Street in Ellicott City? What contractor performed the work?

Today I also wonder who insures them. All of them.

A friend shared this Facebook post with me:

In the interest of transparency, and at the same time that I saw the above Facebook post during the blur that followed the 2016 rain event, it happens that the man who worked for the contractor that built the storm water management system for the newly rebuilt Burgess Mill Station, got in touch with us to tell us that he was told to cut corners when building this Storm Water Management pond. It was not of proper size and depth and did not follow guidelines set forth by appropriate zoning and planning boards.

I wonder who insures that contractor.